Category: Early Modern to Eighteenth Century

Catherine Packham, Eighteenth-Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 264pp. Hb £50.00. ISBN 9780230276185. In Eighteenth-Century Vitalism, Catherine Packham considers, in a wider context, a theory of life that is most strongly associated with Romantic-era medicine: the existence of a ‘vital principle’. Packham also denies Romantic claims of the earlier century’s mechanistic view of nature,…

Karen Smyth, Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011). 198 pp. £89.99. ISBN 978-1-4094-0631-0. (BSLS members receive a 20% discount on Ashgate titles.) In this well researched study, Karen Smyth delineates the ways and means of literary expressions of time in the poetry of Lydgate and Hoccleve. The choice of texts automatically…

Judy A. Hayden (ed.), Travel Narratives, The New Science, and Literary Discourse, 1569-1750 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 244 pp. £55 hb. ISBN: 9781409420422 This volume examines interconnections between science, technique and art. The lines which we now draw between these general fields of knowledge were not established in the early modern period, and the introductory chapter…

Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 231 pp. £18.99 pb. ISBN. 978-1-137-01112-1. Midway through her study of Percy Bysshe Shelley and vitality, now issued in paperback, Sharon Ruston claims that the poet was ‘linked publicly and intellectually with this band of men who questioned the existence of a soul, the need…

Rebecca Totaro, The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures, 1603-1721 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). £65.00, 348pp. ISBN. 9781-1-4094-41-17-7. BSLS members are entitled to a 20% discount on Ashgate titles. Click here for details. In The Wonderful Year (1603) Thomas Dekker paints a vivid and chilling tableau of the plague dead in which we are…

Wendy Beth Hyman (ed.), The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), xi+210 pp. £55.00 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-6865-7 BSLS members are entitled to a 20% discount on Ashgate titles. Click here for details. As the introduction to this collection of essays notes, a number of real-life automata have been preserved from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The…

Lara Vetter, Modernist Writings and Religio-Scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), xi + 219 pp. £58.00 hb. ISBN 9780230621220 Modernist literature has long been seen in the light of its break from religious orthodoxies and situated in the context of philosophical accounts of secularism by Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, James Frazer,…

Lynne Bruckner and Daniel Brayton (eds), Ecocritical Shakespeare (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 280 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-6919-7. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Ecocritical Shakespeare is a volume of 13 essays that explores both an ecocritical reading of Shakespeare and a Shakespearean redefinition of ecocriticism by locating and analyzing environmental and ecopolitical…